These Employees Won’t Have To Go To Work On Thanksgiving – As a former retail worker this hits close to home. Companies are going to find out that opening on Thanksgiving is a bad idea. One, it doesn’t increase sales for that week because it just lets the people who are going to shop first thing on the morning on Black Friday sleep in and do the rest of their shopping later. Second, its just going to piss other potential shoppers off because you are invading your workers and your shoppers holiday.

The inside story of how new MLS team LAFC went from dream to reality – As a soccer purist, I would love promotion and relegation to be a part of the MLS. As someone who just missed out on the NASL glory days, lived through the years in the wilderness with no top flight soccer league, watched as a MLS contracted wonderful to watch teams that were horribly business manged, what Henry Nguyen says here (“They were like, ‘Wait a second: First of all, there’s no relegation? All right, you got me!'” Nguyen, 41, said with a laugh.) should not be forgotten. The people putting up the money to buy a team and build stadiums want as much of ROI guarantee as they can get and the possibility of going from hosting the LA Galaxy to the Carolina Rail Hawks is not something they want in the equation.

The 100 Best Beers in the World – Judging beer is a completely subjective concept and I usually look at lists like this with a cringe, but the sheer size of this list and the number and breadth of the contributors from the craft beer world makes it a good one.

FIFA: Qatar 2022 winter World Cup likely, Jan-Feb or Nov-Dec ‘options’ – I can’t decide if I think the World Cup will be in Qatar in 2022 or not. On one hand you have the heat, the slave labor, and the sense that the whole way it was chosen was one of the dirtiest processes in the history of international sport. On the other hand, FIFA and its leaders are full of DGAF.

Finding Marlowe – How many interesting stories like this are out there? So much of history is obscured or lost simply because of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. I don’t want political correctness in history, I just want truth. I want to know the full history no matter how ugly it may be. Also, the history of Los Angeles seems to be filled with fixer guys like this through out its history and more then any other city in the United States.

Are You Genetically Programmed to Hate Hoppy Beer? – Its amazing how much of our genetic code was written when humans were hunter-gatherers trying to survive to the age or 35. This is the most plausible explanation as to why we like the taste of things we do and how much of that comes not from our genetic affinity for something, but because of how we learn from others around us.

What Is An Ending? ‘Serial’ And The Ongoing Story Of Wanting Too Much – One of the more interesting things I read this week, but the link on NPR is broken. In this blog post on Monkey See, Linda Holmes writes about our expectations of fiction is that it will always find “closure.” She is writing about a new true crime podcast from This American LIfe called “Serial” and how some people have voiced the idea that they will be disappointed if there is not some type of satisfying ending. That is what people mean when they say closure and they want closure out of their fiction and their stories because it is a concept that doesn’t exist in real life. In real life relationships and situations stop with no warning and often with little to any satisfaction. If the link worked you would love reading it.

How Your Brain Decides Without You – This is a really interesting read on how two people can watch the same event, read the same book, see the same facts, and come away with diametrically opposed views on what they just experienced.

Sea of Crises – Speaking of closure, I think I like this because it doesn’t resolve anything at the end. It just kind of ends with the anticipation of something ending or beginning, you don’t know which. This is the most interesting article on Sumo wrestling you will read all year. It also touches on Japanese literature and a little post World War II history.